There really is only so much you can do in January.

Nevertheless, the (comparatively) warmer weather that was forecast for the last few days got me out to the garden, mostly in a desperate bid to curb the burgeoning slug population. I just knew they'd be out and about and ever so active as soon as the temperature would hover around 10ºC. More of the cheapest possible lager from Lidl, this time offered in a variety of receptacles was again very popular, but at the same time I worry it'll have made hardly a dent to the teeming, slimy masses closing in on my few ailing brassicas - and the Digitalis.

The top plate sits on the sticks.

I've also sorted through my stash of seed packets and sowed some; a few perennials, sweet peas, and a winter lettuce. They're all in the little completely unheated greenhouse outside for now, while I figure out a way to cat-proof a window sill: being sat upon or dug at will not improve chances of germination.

~~~

I'm on Suttons' mailing list, and today they entice me with this:

Ribes aureum 'Fourberry Black Gem'

Apparently it'll only grow to 1.2-1.5 m tall, with presumably similar spread, so I just might have room for *one*. I'd dearly love to have some soft fruit, but space, especially sunny space, is an issue. Shall think upon this.

Whilst procrastinating...

...over my remaining exam revision, I've started to poke about with Google SketchUp again. My word. This'll be a steep learning curve from zero knowledge of CAD of any kind, but so worth it.
And nerdy kind of fun. No, really.

This is the first of the series of "getting started" videos:

Also...

The bluebells (Hyacinthoides hispanica, almost certainly) that came with the garden are well on their way up. Perhaps this year I'll replant some meaningfully.

Right in front of the greenhouse, too.

Plus there's a mouse frequenting the bird feeders. Not looking forward to dealing with that one.

Revision time

The skills test for the Practical Horticulture module is tomorrow, so I used the need to practice as an excuse to get outside.

I mixed a seed sowing compost from a Lidl general purpose compost and horticultural sand for some green manure seed. I sowed them by the book, except for sieving the compost for the lack of a soil sieve. The green manure seeds sown in the back part of the garden back in October mostly went for the birds again, so if the weather holds I'll be able to plant on some seedlings instead.

They might even germinate!

The wonderfully deep magenta christmas hyacinths from Ikea had gone over rather, but I want to try to get them bloom outside come spring next year.

*wilt*

 Thusly, as a second practice, I made a bulb planting compost mix from:

1/6 horticultural sand

1/6 vermiculite

4/6 compost

A pinch of seaweed meal

Vermiculite & sand

A very free-draining mixture, this.

I wanted to separate the bulbs, but, well...

Pot pound, much?

For the compost part of the mixture I went for half Lidl general purpose, half B&Q house plant compost. The latter is stored indoors and I didn't want to give the roots too much of a temperature shock (this is VERY IMPORTANT. anything unable to regulate its own temperature can die from a fast change in temperature even when it would survive both temperatures, given a chance to acclimatise.).

Potted with some pebbles at the bottom of the pot for drainage, slightly deeper than originally. I've no idea if that's the right thing to do, but they'll be planted even deeper when they go out. Once the weather's reliably a bit warmer I'll harden them off via the greenhouse and plant them in a corner somewhere.

Sorting through my stash of seed packets probably wasn't strictly necessary for revision. Also, there are now all of three Roosters chitting on kitchen window sill for my "learn to grow potatoes in case of an apocalypse" project. Heh.

Projects, I can haz them

Three of them. My own back garden (there isn't a front one) and two very different gardens belonging to family members.

My garden is a small urban garden at the back of a small Victorian terraced split-level house. Such as of yet nebulous plans I have! There will be food crops, and pretty flowers, and bird feeders, and room to hang out laundry.

April last year, just after we moved in.

The other ones are a Celtic Tiger commuter belt housing estate back garden (henceforth referred to as "K2") and a large rural garden on a mountain side. I'd love to do the bigger garden at the "prairie" style of Piet Oudolf, since it would work with the scale of the place as well as the location,  sloping towards some fields. I've yet to pitch this to the owner, but who would say no to something like this, hmm?

Source: oudolf.com

...not that I'll have quite this much to work with. Thank gods.
For further inspiration, here's Piet Oudolf's flickr stream.

~~~

The most obvious challenge at K2 is the heavy clay soil. Whether it's top soil brought in or the original greenfield ex-stud paddock soil I don't know, but if it's at all wet, I'm not heavy enough to sink a spade in, even if jumping up and down on it.

For the "Mountain Prairie", the exposed location will be an interesting aspect to work around. Other than that, We Shall See.

Plant ID Portfolio - some final notes

The posts with the "plant id' label constitute my Plant Portfolio for the Plant Identification and Classification module on year one of my BSc of horticulture studies at ITB.

This turned out to be quite an undertaking, as I checked the RHS A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants for each one of the plants - as well as my 1998 copy of Hillier's for all trees and shrubs (see Bibliography). The final descriptions and cultivation notes are based on those, and my lecture notes.

The sizes are as listed on the Encyclopedia and refer to mature plants - though it's well worth keeping in mind that in many parts of Ireland the growing conditions are sufficiently better for the ultimate size of many plants to be remarkably larger from the one listed, even in an "average" location.

I've also included additional notes on various topics for a smattering of plants, mostly out of my own interest.


Observations and reflection:

While the required 120+ plants only scrape the bloom of the surface of the continuously growing number of garden plants in cultivation, I've noticed that I'm already able to identify the vast majority of the shrubs and hedges I see anywhere I go. This, however, says a lot more about the variety of plants people go for (and/or garden centres sell!) than my abilities or knowledge level.

In any case, it's already obvious that there's nigh unlimited scope for educating the plant purchasing public to broaden their tastes. Perhaps the impending and encroaching climate change will help there, making consumers more open to new solutions.

I think the blog approach was probably the right one. The process was slower than I expected (all that leafing through books turned out to consume a lot of time!), and I did learn a lot as I went along. I haven't yet fully utilised all the features the medium offers; I haven't, for example, linked to external pages with more information for most plants. On the other hand, adding material in the future will be easy - as well as finding all this information! It won't languish at the bottom of a bookshelf but can be accessed from anywhere.

Plant ID - Bibliography

Bibliography

Beazley, M. (2002) The Royal Horticultural Society Essential Gardening Techniques. London: Octopus Publishing Group Limited.

Brickell, C. ed. (1996) The Royal Horticultural Society A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants. London: Dorling Kindersley Limited.

Brickell, C. ed. (2006) The Royal Horticultural Society Gardeners’ Encyclopedia of Plants & Flowers. 4th Ed., London: Dorling Kindersley Limited.

Flora Europaea Search Results (2011) [online] Edinburgh, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Available from: http://rbg-web2.rbge.org.uk/cgi-bin/nph-readbtree.pl/feout?FAMILY_XREF=&GENUS_XREF=Primula+&SPECIES_XREF=vulgaris&TAXON_NAME_XREF=&RANK= [Accessed: 26th Nov 2012].

Grounds, R. (1998) The Plantfinder’s Guide to Ornamental Grasses. Newton Abbot, Devon, England: David & Charles Publishers.

Hessayon, D. (1983) The Tree & Shrub Expert. Waltham Cross, England: pbi Publications.

Hillier, J and Coombes, A. eds (2004) The Hillier Manual of Trees & Shrubs. Newton Abbot, Devon, England: David & Charles Publishers.

Hillier Nurseries (1998) The Hillier Manual of Trees & Shrubs Pocket Edition. Newton Abbot, Devon, England: David & Charles Publishers.

Hughes, G. ed. (1996)  A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Kitchen Garden. Godalming, Surrey, England: Colour Library Books Ltd.

Key, H. (1997) Ivies - A Wisley Handbook. London: Cassell Educational Limited.

Lipanovich, M. ed. (2002) Landscaping with Ornamental Grasses. Menlo Park, California: Sunset Books Corporation.

Plants (2012) [online] London, The Royal Horticultural Society. Available from: http://www.rhs.org.uk/Plants. [Accessed multiple times].


NB: This bibliography does not include the resources linked to from the individual posts.

Additional images for Plant ID

Choisya ternata blooming in a park in Glasnevin.

My plant ID test nemesis, Elaeagnus x ebbingei.

The delightful autumn colour of a
 Cotoneaster horizontalis.

Aucuba japonica

Prunus laurocerasus 'Otto Luyken' does not
look like its "big brother" P. laurocerasus.

Prunus laurocerasus 'Otto Luyken' in park, badly
maintained and poorly (note chlorotic leaves).

Stipa tenuissima 'Pony Tails'
(source)

Fatsia japonica in bloom at Dublin Zoo

Fatsia japonica

Viburnum tinus 'Eve Price' in bloom
in December.

I wanted to make a whole separate post on trees, but ended up spending my afternoon worm wrangling instead. Here's a picture of the avenue length of the North Circular Road, with the vista carefully aimed at the Wellington Monument in the distance. This is the kind of thing I worry about replacing - will the future city horticulturists follow the footsteps of their Victorian forebears when the time comes, or just give up?

The trees are probably Platanus x acerifolia.

And finally another tree not included in our lists, but one I particularly like: Garrya elliptica:

It stays relatively small and isn't particularly demanding, making it a perfect plant for modern urban and Celtic Tiger housing estate gardens.

...which reminds me that I'm also fond of the smaller Sorbus spp. and vars, especially those in the Aucuparia section [Hillier 1998] with their delicate-looking pinnate leaves and variety of berry colours. Something like Sorbus vilmorinii is definitely on my "one day when" list.

Misadventures in vermicomposting.

Oh boy.

Turns out the worms weren't dying because they were being overfed, or because the pH had gone awry, or because they were too dry.

They were soggy, waterlogged and anaerobic. I've been giving each batch of poops a generous squirting from the spray bottle because last summer the worms stopped eating when the set-up got too dry. Turns out that probably hasn't been strictly necessary *for quite some time*. The soil, i.e. the cat poops transformed into worm poops, was not just cold but dense, solid and, as mentioned, obviously anaerobic.

...how do I know it was cold and dense? I donned two pairs of plastic gloves and dug in.

Let me just take a moment here to say OH GODS YUCK YUCK YUCK AAARGGHHH EW EW EW EEWWWWWWWWWW!!!

There.

I dug out the wettest bits of the mess and pulled and picked out as many dead worms as I could see. There were  lots. Then I added in some lightly dampened coir worm bedding I had left over from starting the smaller wormery (I do have two, one wasn't quite enough for three cats, even in the summer) as well as a fair bit of carefully hand shredded newspaper, and tried to mix it all in as evenly as possible. In the process I came across a handful or two's worth of live worms, so all is not lost.

The survivors were mostly mature ones, too, so now that they have better conditions with a good supply of calcium, it's only a question of time before there'll be lots of slick worm sex (it always feels like it should feel impolite to open the lid to find a tangle of worms, fused together and busy exchanging gametes) followed by pitter patter of lots of little worm feet. As it were.

Since the population has plummeted for now, I'll need to treat it as as a new start and build up the feeding slowly again.

What I learned:
I'll want to get a little plastic shovel or fork for gently turning the vermicomposts occasionally, to make sure the waterlogging won't happen again. Including more (as in any!) shredded newspaper or similar occasionally would probably be good, too.
And next time the wormery stops making its busy moist slithering noises I'll check it *straight away*, not in a couple of days. Because most of the dead worms looked pretty recent casualties, and there were whole groups just dead in their burrows in the soil, so it seems the conditions must've flipped from ok to lethal pretty quickly.

On hindsight I probably should also have made sure the bottom drainage hole is draining properly, but, well, I was a wee bit preoccupied with not thinking too hard about what I was at. Peculiarly though, it didn't smell too bad, just the slight whiff of methane of the anaerobic bacteria munching on dead worm. Blessings, see me count them.

I dumped the anaerobic gick (a highly technical term) with the dead worms and most of the undigested poops in the garden and will dig it a little trench tomorrow, once I've daylight. No, I won't be burying it where I'll be growing edibles - not that the free ranging cats of the neighbourhood have that qualm. And, really, if we're going to get toxoplasmosis from these cats, we'll have it already.

Unfortunately I wasn't really thinking about immortalising the... dead... worms... Er. Anyway no pictures of the disaster, had other things on my mind at the time, imagine that. Here's what they have now, though. The sheet of newspaper gives the little helpers somewhere to escape if things are still too wet. The stuff that looks like sawdust is bokashi bran that came with the wormery; it in theory has lots of micro-organisms that will help getting decomposition started again.

~~

This was a lot bigger a job than I thought it was going to be, but Lessons have been Learned.

Plant ID Week 8: Winter twig identification

The very last Plant ID session was on winter twig identification. When identifying trees and shrubs not in leaf, one has to rely on other features for identification, such as the colour, texture, size and positioning of buds, bark colour, twig shape and structure and so on. Once you know what to look at, twigs that looked very similar will resolve to look quite distinctive.

The Woodland Trust have an excellent twig identification sheet which can be downloaded from here. It covers all our twigs barring Malus sylvestris, and the below images are from there (clicking on an image lets you view it in full size).

(Field maple (Acer campestre) isn't on our list)

Note catkins on alder (Alnus glutinosa)
and hazel (Corylus avellana).

Note difference in hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna)
 and blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) bark texture.

Here's our full list of winter twigs, with identification information:

Malus sylvestris twigs. Note the abruptly finishing shoots.
(Source)

Tilia x europaea bud detail. Note the mitten-like shape.

Aesculus hippocastanum twig detail showing
the horseshoe shaped leaf scar.

Reflection:
There are a large number of online winter twig identification keys of various quality and usability. If choosing to use one, you should first of all check where in the world it applies to - a North American key would be of limited use in Ireland. Additionally in the horticultural trade we're not limited to native and naturalised trees, but will also need be able to distinguish any number of deciduous shrubs around the year. Here experience will be the best teacher.

One last thing to keep in mind is to not just look at the tips of twigs when identifying a deciduous specimen: the shape and general habit of the tree can be as important an identifying feature. For example, I'm reasonably sure these are Carpinus betulus 'Fastigiata', the upright elm, a popular modern street tree, just by their shape.

Plant ID Week 1: Weeds

The very first full Plant ID practical session was on weeds. Here are some images, with links to a plethora of information from Garden Organic at the UK.

Ranunculus repens, creeping buttercup.
More information here.

Red deadnettle information here, coltsfoot here.
 P. major here.

Poa annua, more on which herewith.

A Sonchus sp and Senecio jacobea,
 the common ragwort.

Stinging nettle, Urtica dioica.

Broad-leaved dock, Rumex obtusifolius. The other common
dock is the curled dock, R. crispus.
Dock seeds can survive in soil for 50 years. Fifty. Years.

Pineappleweed, Matricaria discoidea. Does
indeed sort of smell of pineapple.

Not chickweed (Stellaria media). Knotweed, Polygonum sp.

Information here.

Spear thistle, detail.

The common mouse-ear, Cerastium fontanum

My "favourite", hah, weed is now couch grass, Elymus repens. I used to consider the creeping buttercup ("sprinting buttercup", my mother-in-law says) my nemesis, but have since acquired a garden half of which was completely overrun by couch. I don't expect ever to win that war, but have so far managed to not lose the battles...

Here it is, in all its unassuming glory:

(source)

Looks deceptively meek, doesn't it. Come spring, it'll EAT GLYPHOSATE.

Plant ID Week 2, pt. 2

Second part of the first batch of plants to learn.

Viburnum opulus - guelder rose

(Source)

A large deciduous shrub with white flowers followed by bright red berries. Leaves turn red in the autumn and take their time to fall.
Size: 5x4 m

Cultivation notes:
Shrub; plant November to March, mulch well, water in drought.

Corylus avellana - hazel

Leaves and nuts.
(Source)

C. avellana 'Contorta'.
Note the typical green buds midst of winter.

A small, many-stemmed native tree used for coppicing and nuts. Can give a good autumn colour in a sheltered spot. Yellow "Lamb's tails" catkins in late winter or early spring.
Size: 5x5 m

Cultivation notes:
Tree; plant in a hole 1.5 times the size of the root ball, incorporate organic matter, support and mulch well. Keep well watered until established.

Ilex aquifolium - holly

(Source)

An evergreen native tree with very distinctive shiny foliage. Makes an excellent slow-growing hedge, also in coastal areas, but will grow to an impressive tree if given the chance.
*RHS award of garden merit
Size: up to 25x8 m


Cultivation notes:
Tree; plant in a hole 1.5 times the size of the root ball, incorporate organic matter, support and mulch well. Keep well watered until established.
The holly is dioecious and most cultivars are either male of female. In order for a female plant to produce fruit, it must be pollinated by a male one, which you must have relatively close by (I. aquifolium 'J. C. van Tol' is self pollinating and as such suitable for a small garden).


Betula pendula - silver or common birch

(Source)

A native tree with a high wildlife value and typically yellow autumn colour. Makes for a good pioneer plant, also in light shade, and is thus much-used in new apartment blocks' courtyards.

*RHS award of garden merit
Size: up to 25x10 m


Cultivation notes:
Tree; plant in a hole 1.5 times the size of the root ball, incorporate organic matter, support and mulch well. Keep well watered until established.
Personal note: I got married in a grove of birch trees. :)

Sorbus aucuparia - mountain ash

(Source)

(Source)

A compact tree with spring flowers and ferny foliage, which turns various shades of red in the autumn. The autumn bunches of red berries are much liked by a number of garden birds.
Size: up to 15x7 m

Cultivation notes:
Tree; plant in a hole 1.5 times the size of the root ball, incorporate organic matter, support and mulch well. Keep well watered until established.

Personal note: the rowan is the only significantly flowering and fruit-bearing tree in Northern Finland, and so particularly special.
Observation: S. aucuparia is a wonderful tree, but currently rather overused as a street tree.

Ulex europaeus - gorse, furze

(Source)

A viciously spiny shrub with yellow, almond-scented flowers. Does very well on exposed seaside locations.
Size: up to 2.5 x 2 m

Cultivation notes:
Shrub; plant November to March, mulch well, water in drought.
Plant in poor soil in full sun;  can become leggy in rich soil.

Alnus glutinosa - common or black alder

(Source)

(Source)

A very hardy native tree with pear-shaped glossy leaves that stay on late into the winter. Produces catkins amongst the first trees in the spring (with very allergenic pollen).
Size:25x10 m

Cultivation notes:
Tree; plant in a hole 1.5 times the size of the root ball, incorporate organic matter, support and mulch well. Keep well watered until established.


Prunus insititia - wild damson

(Source)

A thorny native tree with edible fruit. White blossom in the spring
Size: 5x5m

Cultivation notes:
Tree; plant in a hole 1.5 times the size of the root ball, incorporate organic matter, support and mulch well. Keep well watered until established.
Note: not included in Brickell (1996) either as P. insititia or P. domestica ssp. insititia.
Historical note: This forebear of modern plums has been enjoyed since antiquity. Quoth Wikipedia:

"The name damson derives from the Latin prunum damascenum, "plum of Damascus". Damsons were first cultivated in antiquity in the area around the ancient city of Damascus, capital of modern-day Syria, and were introduced into England by the Romans. Remnants of damsons are often found during archaeological digs of ancient Roman camps across England, and ancient writings describe the use of damson skins in the manufacture of purple dye. Prugne damaschine figure in the long list of comestibles enjoyed by the Milanese given by Bonvesin de la Riva in his Marvels of Milan (1288)."

Tilia x europaea - European lime

(Source)

A very popular park and street tree often used for pleaching. Foliage turns yellow in the autumn.

Size: 35x15 m

Cultivation notes:

Tree; plant in a hole 1.5 times the size of the root ball, incorporate organic matter, support and mulch well. Keep well watered until established.

A row of lime trees in December, showing the pleasing
red of younger shoots.